DuckDuckGo Blasts Google for Anti-Competitive Search Behavior

On the heels of Google being fined a record-breaking $5 billion by the EU for antitrust violations, search engine DuckDuckGo has voiced its concerns over Google’s search practices.

In a series of tweets from the company’s official Twitter account, DuckDuckGo voiced its support for the EU cracking down on Google’s anti-competitive search behavior.

We welcome the EU cracking down on Google's anti-competitive search behavior. We have felt its effects first hand for many years and has led directly to us having less market share on Android vs iOS and in general mobile vs desktop. A couple examples…https://t.co/0NGtouiqA2

DuckDuckGo goes on to list the ways in which Google has made it difficult to compete.

Up until just last year, it was impossible to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome on Android, and it is still impossible on Chrome on iOS. We are also not included in the default list of search options like we are in Safari, even though we are among the top search engines in many countries.

The Google search widget is featured prominently on most Android builds and is impossible to change the search provider. For a long time it was also impossible to even remove this widget without installing a launcher that effectively changed the whole way the OS works.

Their anti-competitive search behavior isn't limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension.